


Restless Recruit

by karakael



Category: GaoGaiGar
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-18
Updated: 2012-04-18
Packaged: 2017-11-03 21:36:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/386226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karakael/pseuds/karakael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik never expected to be handed a case quite like this one. But when and old friend shows up with a teenage cyborg in toe he can't exactly turn them away...and in the end he gets far more than he bargained for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Restless Recruit

**Author's Note:**

> Presumably these topics (Renais' training and relationship with her first partner) are covered in her tie-in novel. Unfortunately it has yet to be translated into English. This is my attempt to cover some of the same material, given no knowledge of the original source. 
> 
> Also, I apologize for the terrible French.

The girl is sitting in the jail cell at the back of the station, hands folded on her lap, back straight, not relaxing an inch, despite having not moved in over an hour.

Officer Erik sighed and walked back up to the front. The girl didn't seem to _mind_ sitting in the cell, so who was he to complain? It kept her out of trouble and away from the prying eyes of the rest of the station.

"Look, are you sure you can't take her to America?"

Liger rocked back up from the chair in front of Erik's desk, where he had been waiting. "No can do, I'm afraid. She's a national asset now. The government won't let her out of the country."

"Merde. You sure you need to leave?"

A shrug. "NASA needs me."

"Yeah, but..." _But she's your daughter!_ Was what Erik _wanted_ to say. 

"No way around it, I'm afraid." The professor hopped to his feet. "Don't worry, she won't cause trouble. I'm not sure if she's all there right now, to be honest. What ever Bio-Net did to her, she can't do anything more than follow orders now. Just set her up in a cell and she'll be fine."

Erik bit back a horrified answer. Just because the girl wasn't in the same room and probably couldn't hear his words, didn't mean the man could say that. (And she _could_ hear every word, Erik found out later.) But Liger had always been like this, ever since college. Always assuming people would understand his idiosyncrasies, without ever taking the time to think about others more normal feelings. _Like the feeling of abandonment..._

But he was brilliant, and Erik's superiors had reminded him that the man was providing exceptional designs for their defense grid in exchange for caring for his daughter. Though why in the world they though _Erik_ would have the time to care for the girl...

"I know you'll do your best! Erik's good with kids, I told them. So don't worry so much, old friend!"

That explained that. Figures that those in command would roll over and take any suggestion from the genius's mouth. Pity they didn't seem all that interested in listening to the girl. 

Not that she had said much. She didn't even blink when her father had wished her goodbye and skated out of the station house. Nor did she do more than nod when he brought her food, two hours later. Renais simply stared straight ahead, making no motion, as if awaiting orders.

Finally, Officer Erik sighed. He'd been reassigned from special forces for this duty, but he wasn't about to waste government time guarding someone who didn't move.

He wandered back into the cells, slid back the unlocked door and said "We're going on patrol."

She blinked. At least that was something.

"You. Up. Pull on your coat, and lets get going."

She obeyed the orders mechanically, tapping her feet into gold-painted boots and struggling slightly with the heavy material of her cooling-coat. Apparently Liger had told her never to take it off, but she must not have heard him. (She had.)

"Right. Now, you're not allowed to confront anyone. We're in a bad neighborhood, alright? So just keep to yourself and let me do the talking if anything comes up."

Another blank look and she followed him out onto the suburban street. A few minutes brought them into the darker side of town, the one where normal cops didn't walk except during the daylight or in groups. But Renais didn't bat an eye at the graffiti or street-punks that looked up as they walked by. 

A pity, because getting a reaction was half of the reason Erik had brought her here. Most people said _something_ when confronting the grungier side of Paris. But she just walked beside him, hands shoved deep into her pockets, eyes staring straight ahead. 

Until a gunshot rang out, and a few moments later a car sped past. 

"Damn it!" Erik began to run, forgetting the girl beside him, and focusing instead on finding the screaming victim. His hand had already typed the code on his phone before he realized that the person he was _supposed_ to be protecting was nowhere around. But then there was a kid bleeding on the street, and he forgot about his responsibilities for a few moments...

There was a screech, a crash, and the sound of distant gunfire. Then the sound of an approaching vehicle. Erik looked up, straight into the accelerating headlights of a black van. His life started to spin...and then there was a flash of pink and the front two tires of the vehicle exploded and the engine hit the concrete.

Renais stood on the hood of the car, balancing easily as it skidded to a halt barely a foot away from Erik and the boy. A tall white man stumbled out of the car, coughing smoke, a pistol hanging loosely in one hand. The rest of the drug gang followed, various body-guards and finally their leader, a dark youth in a suit and looking surprisingly unworried by the totaled car.

He said something in thick city-slang to the man with the pistol, only to have Renais shoot the offending weapon out of his hand in a motion so quick the rest of the gang's mouths dropped open.

Erik hadn't even seen her pull the weapon, much less seeing where it came from. But what she did next was even more of a surprise.

She responded to the leader.

Her slang was slower, but still too thick to understand. The gang apparently understood, though and after a heated conversation one member stepped forward. 

" _Cette lui_ " The leader pointed at him. " _Il lui a dechargee pour le sport._ "

Renee spat, and responded with a swear that would have dropped Erik's mouth, had it not already been hanging open. She then continued to berate the gang leader until one of the other man spilled something that the entire group apparently didn't like, sparking a heated argument which only ended when, without any obvious effort, Renais flipped the car.

Silence filled the street, along with the distant ring of sirens. The altercation had lasted barely a minute, but already the gang looked more scared of her than the approaching police. The leader snapped his fingers and the entire group turned to flee. But Renee caught the last two by the backs of their shirts as they began to run and shoved them to the ground with a move that Erik had learned in the police academy. 

The other members didn't turn to help their fallen comrades, in fact the leader seemed to expect that those men would be lost, given the fact that one was the apparent culprit and the other the white man with the obvious gun. Renais didn't make a motion to follow the rest, just stood with her foot burning a hole in one man's shirt, back to being completely calm.

What the hell _was_ this girl?

\--------------

"Well?" Erik repeated his earlier statement, glaring at the girl who was now sitting on a cushion in the lobby. 

"I didn't do anything wrong. I followed police procedure for catching a suspect."

"I _told_ you to leave everything to me!"

Not that Erik was particularly angry. She was completely right; she'd followed procedure, at least procedure when dealing with the ghetto, to the letter. The only problem was that she wasn't a cop, and there was no regulations written up for dealing with someone who could flip cars.

"That would have been inefficient." A pause, and then the ghost of a smile flickered across her face. "Copper."

Erik leaned back against his desk and sighed. "And that's another thing. Where'd you learn to talk like that? No one keeps up with the street-slang but the people who live there."

"Inefficient. How would one fit in if unable to speak?"

...fair enough. Were Erik assigned permanently to the beat, he'd have probably picked up enough to get along. "That's not what I'm asking. How do _you_ know it."

"I know ten languages and can mimic various regional accents in three."

(Later Erik found out that Bio-Net had enlarged the speech-recognition parts of her brain, leaving her able to pick up languages as fast as most children.)

"That _still_ isn't what I'm asking. Why. Do you. Know street?"

Liger said she could only follow orders. So why the hell was she so good at twisting them? That, or the man had just been dead wrong about his own daughter.

Another ghost of an expression - this one shown through a quick role of the eyes. "I. Don't. Know. Maybe. since. I grew up there?" 

That piece of information slotted its way into Erik's picture of the poised young woman in front of him. "...explain."

A long look, and then she slowly opened up. "I grew up in Paris, duh. But we moved around a lot, since my mother needed to stay away from Bio-Net. Its easier to hide in a crowd, easier to hide where people won't trust shinny cars and people with "official" badges. She might have been paid alright, but it was just safer to keep ourselves out of sight as much as possible."

The girl lapsed into silence and looked away out the window. There was the beginnings of a real expression there - grief.

"I miss her."

\---------------------------

What was someone supposed to say to that? The girl was seventeen - she was supposed to be in highschool, not supposed to be some super-powered assassin. But if what she was slowly telling Erik was true, she had _never_ had a normal life. 

She and her mother had always been on the move, only keeping up occasional ties to her father. She'd only known Liger through photographs and the explanation that he had helped to "get mummy out" - out of the Bio-Net spy program and into a normal life. But the woman hadn't been content with that; she'd kept moving, always gathering extra information on the corrupt corporation, training her daughter to take care of herself and keep watch for the agents Bio-Net might send after them.

Half of Renais' training had been done before Bio-Net had ever set their hands on her. She could already speak five languages; French, Japanese, English, Spanish and German; knew her way around fire-arms, could blend in with a crowd in a few minutes, and knew the exact moment when it was time to break and run.

"We had all these little...codes, you know?" As she spoke her accent drifted into less posh and more urban-tower style. "Silly stuff, stuff that no one would notice. A blue ribbon tied around a light-post meant that I shouldn't come home that day. If she asked about my pet in conversation that meant someone was watching us. If I was scared I'd say I saw a bird that morning. And I always knew where the next place we were moving would be, even if we stayed someplace a long time."

"I think the longest we stayed put was a year. Something had happened on the news - Bio-net had finally gotten a law-suit filed against it - and it made her feel safe enough to settle down for a bit. It was nice. I made friends, actually got a real pet, started taking voice lessons...and then the suit fell through and we were gone the next day. But in the areas where we lived...that was okay. Sometimes people just needed to skip town. That was the only time I got to say goodbye, though."

"My mom...she started off as just a scientist, you know? So she was always finding jobs at little pharmacies and Dr. Liger had made her up some really good papers so that she'd get good pay no matter what. So its not like I went hungry or anything. And the government would never touch our buildings and left us alone, since she was always sending them more information on Bio-Net."

_Dr. Liger_ Erik noticed. Not 'father' or 'dad'. No, " _Dr. Liger_ ". 

"Can I stop talking now?" 

He looked up, and saw her picking at the carry-out he'd picked up. There were five neat burn-marks on the box from where her fingers were touching it.

"Sure. Didn't know you were so talkative, Kid. You're dad said..."

"I don't have a dad."

The statement was wooden, taking what had been the thoughtful pondering and turning into hard steel.

"Doctor Liger..."

"Isn't here. Neither is my mother, but she has the excuse of being dead."

And that was that. 

\----------

Five months later, Renais was enrolled in the police academy. They had waved the age requirement due to her "special circumstances", and eventually had to re-write portions of the curriculum for her. Can't have a cyborg with rock-steady aim competing with the human cadets on the shooting range, for example. Better to have her be accurate with a sniper-rifle with no scope in the dark at 3000 meters. Even then, there was little _new_ they could teach her.

It surprised Erik that the let her in at all, given her history and the fact that she was "a valuable national asset". One that was now trained not to be an assassin, but a police officer. He doubted she would have passed the final tests, though, had she not broken down about Bio-Net.

"I _hate_ them. They've destroyed everything I care about, and more than that, they're continuing to destroy other people's lives even today. I don't _care_ if they often work outside our jurisdiction, if we can take out their operations _here_ then we can help the rest of the world. I don't care _who_ you assign me to, as long as I have a shot at protecting normal people from what they do. _No one_ should have to suffer that."

She didn't catch the quickly-hidden smiles at her response, though she surely noticed the plethora of cameras on her. Erik watched the tapes afterwards, trying to strip away his own bias and judge her like he would any other candidate.

"She's smart, I'll give her that." One of the others on the review board mentioned.

"Trust worthy, though?" Erik asked, forcing him to put aside the distasteful feeling in his gut at the question. 

"I think she's proved that rather well. Her field-work is good, and her test scores are excellent."

"I heard they had to test her on a whole different scale of accuracy."

"Well, she's got internal sites. And re-enforced bones. And joints that can lock in position." The director flipped through her substantial file. "Gentlemen, I don't think this is a question of _whether_ we'll accept her, but rather what division she's going to."

"Can't be anything external - UN won't stand for it."

"Shouldn't be anything in intelligence. She's too valuable and asset and we can't risk a defection or capture."

"If I might make a suggestion..." Heads turned to Erik. "Chasseur can always use more people."

"That's your division, right? She'll need higher clearance if she's going to be doing drug-busts and special-division work."

"I think she's earned it." This from a smaller woman at the other end of the table. She grinned at Erik. "And its dangerous work, just the sort of thing to send a cyborg into."

Erik nodded. "Plus, it'll give her a chance to take down Bio-Net."

"Personal vendettas are dangerous..." The director looked uncomfortable.

"So are kids getting turned into war-machines." 

"Fair enough. You can have her, if you want."

\----------------------

"Got your assignment yet?" He leaned on the patrol car, waiting for the newly minted agent. 

"Yeah. Move." He obliged and she slipped into the passenger side of the car, into the seat which they had reinforced with a heat-resistant cover. "I've never heard of it though. "Chaucer"? Is that some kind of top-secret division?"

"What do you think?"

In the seven months since he'd met her, Renais had gained quite a few abilities back. One was open facial expressions. She rolled her eyes at him and sneered. 

"A regular officer like you probably doesn't have the clearance to know, right?"

"Think again, metal-head." He pointed to a line of small print at the bottom of one of the forms. 

She squinted. "...Captain? _Captain_ Erik? Since when - "

"You didn't think they'd assign a national treasure to someone who couldn't protect it, did you?"

He grinned, as for the first time he was able to get _her_ to look shocked.

"Welcome to Chasseur, kiddo. This is where things get _fun_."


End file.
